Puppy Wary 5.3 won't shutdown

[Tuber]

It could be a problem that doesn't affect most other computers.

My little Atom/NM10 Netbook has issues with another USB boot disk as well. Under the Parted Magic "Extras" menu you can boot the Super Grub, or Super Grub 2 disks, but on my Acer those 2 options cause a restart (they work fine on other computers).

Other than that, everything else I've tried has worked as expected. I currently have 6 different Linux distros installed for testing, and all were booted and installed from USB flash drives made with live CD/DVD images.

[Tuber]

From what I have read on-line, ext 2 is the best file system for a usb drive in terms of performance...

Then you might want to read this.
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/7208/1

[greengeek]

EDIT: It breaks on the second boot. There is a message about doing something to the file system that will make it boot faster next time. After that it will no longer shut down.

Oh, and it may be relevant that I also have an Acer Aspire One Netbook. Model AO532h, Atom N450, Intel NM10 chipset, 2GB RAM, BIOS revision 1.26, Atheros wired and wireless network interface chips, Broadcom Bluetooth and CrystalHD decoder.

I had a series of strange problems on one of my Acer netbooks - it was an N450 based NAV51 (aka 350-21G16i as far as I can make out from the barcode sticker. MFG date 1009)

I had boot hangs, and also the "reboot to desktop" that you mention (Accompanied with a loss of access to the network hware...)

I tore my hair out for weeks trying to understand what was causing it and came to the following conclusions:

1) Several Puppies have scripts that alter the configuration on the second (and sometimes subsequent) boots. This means that things can seem "sorted" after a reboot, only to "fall back" to a nonfunctional state later on. I think this has something to do with filesystems not being mounted or dismounted correctly - at least judging by the comments I have seen from Karl and Shinobar regarding /tmp and fuser at shutdown time (I am totally unqualified to offer any useful comments about this - but it almost seems like some scripts "stack up" a list of changes to be done at shutdown or at next boot, but those scripts get sidetracked by something that happens to the filesystems and get into an unhealthy loop).
Maybe see Shinobars comments on this page:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... start=2805

2) Some BIOS's "remember" something (a hardware state or similar...) after the software shuts down, and for as long as the motherboard has power. (This is a hard one to explain - but on my Acer I got different results when I was booting from a USB stick depending on how recently I had powered my hardware off). Also - I have many times seen a BIOS behave differently depending on whether "wall power" has been removed. Some power supplies cause a pilot voltage to be supplied to the BIOS and/or usb buses until the wall plug is pulled. Some BIOS behave differently after you shut off to that "cold" state. I think of this type of BIOS as being a "live bios". I do wonder if battery-based devices like netbooks and laptops may have some strange interaction between the bios and ACPI depending on battery state etc - maybe the "poweroff" state is not truly a "poweroff" until the bios decides what is happening between the incoming wall power and battery charge circuit. I don't know.

3) I had been using the wrong method to write my mbr. In fact I was not rewriting the mbr - without realising it I was retaining the mbr that came on the usb stick and it contributed to the symptom I mentioned in (2) above.

Incidentally I had no joy with Bootflash (could have been my inexperience at fault...)

(FWIW some of the boot problems I had which illustrate the dynamic nature of the bios / mbr and usb bus are noted here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=78045
and here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... start=2865


What this taught me is that there are mysteries that affect the specific actions occurring at boot time, especially on more modern hardware, and things are not as straightforward as they used to be when a bios was "dead". Boot actions and timings are affected by what the bios sees in terms of the readiness of it's peripherals, especially when they are on a usb bus (and particularly when that bus is driving SD cards as a boot source).

Probably none of this helps, but I thought I'd just throw it in the ring...

[Monsie]

From what I have read on-line, ext 2 is the best file system for a usb drive in terms of performance...

Then you might want to read this.
http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/tutorials/7208/1

Thanks for that link; it was an interesting read. While the actual results varied between trials and between models or brand of flash drive, ext4 was the clear winner in terms of speed.

However, I should have explained what I meant by the term "performance". First of all, I was thinking in terms of Wary Puppy which is the basis for this thread. As such, I wasn't thinking of performance in terms of speed, but in the broader sense to include factors such as reliability and longevity. That said, I also noted that many things one does in computing involves some sort of trade off.... what one gains on one hand, one loses on the other as explained in this article http://www.ehow.com/info_12216958_puppy ... -ext3.html. On my old hardware, I chose ext2 in order to minimize the number of writes to my flash drive thereby extending its life. Speed was not a consideration for me, especially considering my usb 1.1 spec.

Your post prompted me to do some more research, and I found a solution... which is to format a usb drive with ext4 and disable the journaling feature as explained in this article: http://www.styryx.com/en/computers/oper ... -usb-flash For those who are running Racy and some of the other newer breeds on fairly new systems, then this would appear to be the way to go... but then this could really be the subject of another thread.

Monsie

[Pelo]

Slacko 5.3.3 does not shut down (poweroff inop even with the terminal), neither via the menu , nor by the pup panel, rien de rien. jamais vu ça ! never seen that. Previous Slacko's : no problem at all.